Budgeting

In this chapter, we'll take a look at how to create and manage budgets in BigTime.

BigTime supports three different types of budgets, and different industries will use those budgets in different combinations. You can decide you're going to use just one of those budgeting options, or you can mix and match them to give your firm a level of budgeting detail that's right for you.

Whatever your specific requirements are in the area of budgeting, BigTime can accommodate them. To understand how, let's take a quick look at the types of budgeting that BigTime supports.

Estimate Budgets. These are traditional project budgets, and are BigTime's most popular form of budgeting. You enter in a set of phases or tasks (called "budget items") into your project's dashboard and then estimate hours or fees or both.

Pipeline Budgeting. Each project in the system can be attached to a monthly revenue estimate. This gives your firm a chance to preview expected revenues and to compare it to actuals as the project proceeds.

It's a general tool for predicting what your top line will look like over the next several months. In addition to a pipeline of work in progress, your sales team can fill in pipeline budgets for prospects and likely closes so that you get a look at current vs. future revenue streams.

Allocation Budgets. Allocation budgets break down your work on a per staff and per period basis. In other words, they assign hours (weekly or monthly) to specific staff members to be used on a specific project. (e.g. - "Joe Smith will be spending 40 hours next week on Project ABC"). This type of budget is especially useful for companies that tend to dedicate a resource to a specific account/project for the duration of that project. They let you indicate that a staff member is "committed" to that project for all or part of their next several months.

Allocation budgets can "roll up" from tasks that you've assigned to specific individuals, but they don't have to. You can simply allocate 20 hours per week of someone's time to a specific project in order to keep track of how "filled up" your staff is with client work.